Here’s a photo of the south wall. We’re looking to add a little color in the form of a rug and/or backsplash. It turned out a little black and white but we’ll fix that. Also the flash on my camera kind of bleached things out a bit.

Did you forget what the before photo looked like?

Before photo of south wall.

Here’s our breakfast corner. Jerry had a great idea to build a wall to separate the fridge from this corner and I think it worked out great. The fridge used to be in this corner. Look how much counter space we opened up by moving the fridge.

Here’s a photo down the counter of the same area.

Here’s a shot of the new sink. I kept the faucet that we had as it went well with the overall design.

Our sink is so deep you can hear an echo. 9.75″ profound.

Here’s a photo of the stove side. I love the ease with which I can get to the microwave. No bending down!

Before photo of same side of the room where stove now is.

Here’s one of Jerry’s details. He put a vent in the toe-kick and funneled the old register through it. Nice touch!

A view of the other side of the sink. Look at that miles and miles of counter space! It never ends.

And finally here’s the refrigerator peninsula complete with counter-space for opening bottles of wine!

And the before shot of this same area.

Here’s the before pic at a different angle of that same wall and corner where the fridge used to be. Pretty stark change, huh?

A big thanks to Jerry and Alastair for all their hard work!

We’re coming close to the end of the Ikea Kitchen Remodel. We did some clean up over the weekend. Prior to a kitchen remodel, you may want to just remove your blinds or wrap them in plastic. Granted, not all of this dust is attributable to the kitchen remodel but whoa, what a mess! With new white cabinets, our white appliances and white blinds needed a thorough cleaning.

Other things to consider before a kitchen remodel:

- If you are keeping your appliances or if the new ones have arrived, move them to another room during the remodel. They stay much cleaner.

- An air purifier may come in handy for all the dust that is generated during a remodel.

- Keep the dust contained by shutting off other rooms.

We picked out some knobs and handles for our Ikea Kitchen Cabinets and after the toe kicks went in, it was time for the hardware installation. Here’s Al getting dirty!

Here’s a photo of some of the handles and knobs on the cabinets.

Here’s a photo of one side of the kitchen complete with pulls.

Stove-side with pulls.

Here’s a nice photo of most of the kitchen remodel complete with lighting.

You’ll notice here that we had to place the handle a little lower on these pull-out units. They are anchored at the bottom so work with that low center of gravity and not against it.

It’s all in the details. Jerry hit the registers with some spray paint to make them look new. Here’s the old vs. the new. The countertops are supposed to make their way in tomorrow!

Here’s the latest on the Ikea Kitchen Renovation. Jerry and ALISTAIR came up with this little workaround for the register vent. The cabinet will be sitting on top of it so they fashioned a means of redirecting the air flow out of the vent. They will add a vent to the toe-kick to finish the job. Not a bad little workaround, huh?

Upon further examination, it appears that they have added their personal touch to the vent deflector.

Here’s the corner of the kitchen with all the cabinets in place.

We’re getting there. Just need to add some doors, shelves and countertops among other things.

Another shot of the corner.

Alistair has added the doors and shelves to the Ikea cabinets. Progress is being made!

Hey, and we’ve added some glasses and dishes as well. Never mind our old sink. It’s just serving temporary duty and will soon be gone.

I probably ought to assemble a punch-out list since we’re getting close:

vent cover;
replace porch light;
basement ceiling – 2 spots;
window frame;
quarter-round;
knobs and handles;
remaining shelving;
dishwasher screws;
return extra flooring;
align doors;
outlet covers;
and I’m sure there’s more.

I’m going to combine a couple days here as I missed updating the Ikea Kitchen Blog yesterday. I’ll show you a little bit of the cabinet install process. Here’s our blank slate where we are going to be adding some cabinets.

Here’s Uncle Jerry and Al hanging the metal rail on to which the cabinets will be installed. Level it and screw it into the studs.

Here’s Jerry attaching the cabinet to the metal rail.

Here’s a shot of a couple cabinets installed on to the metal railing.

Here we’ve added another metal rail along the west wall and popped another cabinet on.

Here’s Al posing in front of the corner wall cabinets. Nice job!

We added some base cabinets as well. Jerry and Al are hard at work dealing with the old drain pipe. While taking it off, it just crumbled in their hands. This was the first big surprise we received in the Ikea Kitchen Install.

Check out all the gunk inside this pipe. Over half the diameter was filled with crud. No wonder it didn’t drain well.

Check out the new Tiffany light fixture. Much better than the old ceiling fan.

Here’s the new track lighting as well. Now we have some serious light to illuminate the kitchen.

Here’s a shot of the base cabinets installed today. Tomorrow we should have all the cabinets in place and installed.

I assembled a few cabinets to demonstrate how the process goes. After pulling out the directions and your cabinet’s pieces and parts, I like to arrange things as they appear in the instructions. So here I’ve got all the Ikea cabinet pieces and parts pretty much like they are displayed in the instructions. Notice that I’m also doing the Ikea cabinet assembly on a soft surface to avoid damaging my precious cabinets.

Here, I’ve laid out all the dowels, screws, nails, etc. To my great chagrin, Ikea only gave me 7 of the metal dowels at the very left. On a hunch, I went to the local hardware and found a very similar metal dowel for $1.27.

Here I’ve attached what I’ll call the rear mounting bracket. Notice that its placement is just below the corner.

Here’s the beginning of the metal dowel insertion. And this is when I figured out that I was one metal dowel short. I figured I had several extra of these from previous Ikea assembly projects. A search of the usual locations revealed no suspects however.

Here’s is the correct wooden dowel placement. The instructions will try to tell you otherwise but THEY ARE WRONG.

Ikea’s mistaken cabinet assembly instructions

Ace Hardware came through and gave me a pretty close match for my missing metal dowel. I heard them muttering to themselves as I left – “That’s one of those goofy furniture assembly things, tarnation!”

Here’s the sides assembled. Before you proceed with a step in the Ikea instructions, it’s a good idea to picture the finished product in your mind and consider what you are doing towards that end. A too rapid assembly often results in mistakes and if you complete some steps there may not be any going back to fix it.

For example, if you proceed to nail the back of the cabinet on with the 2 dozen or so nails, it’s really difficult to undo such a move. Questions to ask include – what side should be facing in and what side should be out and – am I nailing this to the correct side and – where do the holes line up? These are all really good questions to consider as well as what should my finished product look like?

Check for square here.

And here’s the almost finished cabinet. My installer likes to just take them to this point and then install them. After that, we will add the doors, shelves, etc.

And here’s a message a received from Ikea on the following day after emailing them:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. We do apologize for any
inconvenience.

Generally, we do recommend returning to the store or contacting your
store directly in order to obtain spare parts, however, we will be
more than happy to assist you with obtaining the spare parts you
require.

Please respond back with the following information so that we may
submit your request.

-first and last name
-mailing address
-contact phone number
-8 digit article number (located above the name of the item on the
receipt, as well as on the packaging, and looks like this:
000.000.00)
-11 digit receipt number (located in the upper, right-hand corner of
the receipt, and looks like this: 0000 0000 000
-Date of purchase
-Detailed explanation of the parts needed, including all part numbers
(5/6 digit part numbers can be found on the assembly instructions)

We thank you for giving us the opportunity to assist you, and hope
this information has been helpful.

Best Regards,
Natalie
IKEA Customer Care Center

Natalie,

Don’t have time to screw around with going back and forth over a simple fastener. I just went to the local hardware store and got the part.

Thanks,

Andy

Ok, we did some painting today and added some more Ikea cabinets. We are coming along slowly but surely. Early next week should bring some more visible results.

Here’s the fridge wall with those Ikea cabinets fitting awfully snug against it. Looks like a tight fit but a good one.

This is the third coat of mud and hopefully the final one. Jerry is pointing out the gap that still remains to be filled with mud. The gap is caused by the mud shrinking as it dries.

Here’s Jerry working the Swiffer Wet Jet to clean up a lot of the dust from sanding the walls. He recommends the Swiffer Wet Jet Mop for Pergo floors.

We’ve got some cabinets up and finally have a hood/vent for our stove. We’ve never had one in this house before today.

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the before shot of this wall from another angle.

Here’s the vent exhaust that still remains to be finished.

Finally, here’s the refrigerator wall after a third coat of mud and sanding.

Here’s the wall before we started the process.

Hey, we added a new recessed light above the sink, and it’s on a switch instead of a chain pull! Oh yeah!

Mud – coat 2

More mud – second coat.

Ok, we’ve got some drywall to finish up. Here’s Jerry working on the corners.

Here’s Jerry pointing to the edge. I’ll let him add more later.

And we are starting to mud the walls.

Another shot of Jerry’s handiwork.

And we’ve got one coat of mud up. Get the air circulating and turn the heat up. We are officially on DRY time! Also notice that the light fixtures are gone.

We showed up at Ikea this morning a little before 11 am. Here’s Jerry fiddling with the kitchen design at Ikea’s kitchen planning station. For some reason, Ikea just can’t take your order that you’ve created at the kitchen planning station. They have to input the order again into their computers. This took about 40 minutes for them to do. The fun begins.

I should back up. We had to return the Tundra Maple Flooring first. I was getting some attitude from the return lady. One of the flooring packages had opened slightly somewhere in the midst of its loading, unloading, reloading, and unloading again. This slight tear in the plastic set her off and she became the return lady nazi. I exaggerate a bit but for a moment I thought I wasn’t going to be able to return a pack of crappy flooring. From there we headed up to the kitchen department.

After waiting for the Ikea help to enter our kitchen order, we paid for it and headed down to the furniture pickup zone (right next to returns). We were told that Ikea coworkers would get the order ready and that we were to watch the tv screen for 67400 to flash up letting us know our order was ready for pickup. This was told to us by some dude in a bunny suit. We were given an estimate of one hour.

So we watched the blue tv screen.

And sat on the couch and waited.

And went outside and smoked and waited.

And took pics of Ikea and waited. Finally, someone approached us to let us know that our order had been ready for the last half hour. Turns out Mr. Bunny Suit gave us the wrong number as 67400 never came up on the screen. But 67300 did come up on the screen. That was total Ikea bullshit.

At least they helped up load it up fairly quickly.

And here’s our truckload of cabinets, etc.